More Zonkyness

Super Injunctions Part 2 – The Footballer’s Affair

May 242011

So today – those of us who really aren’t bothered by who is shagging who – found out who the footballer was that obtained an injunction a while back to stop his alleged extra-marital affair from being published in the gutter press. Yes, we knew that his name was being widely published on Twitter.

But today a combination of a Scottish newspaper (where the English&Welsh injunction didn’t apply), an MP who unwisely released his name in the Commons, and the wide publication of the news on Twitter incited various editors to go ahead and publish. Well I hope they get jailed for contempt of court.

That is the editors of the gutter press who named the footballer. The MP also needs a slap for making use of parliamentary privilege for such a base purpose (discussing the issue would be fine; naming the footballer isn’t). And the original tweeter could do with a fine for contempt of court too.

The moguls of the old media would have you believe that this is all a freedom of the press issue … it isn’t. It is about making money.

They complain that it isn’t fair that tweeters can name the footballer where they can’t. Life isn’t fair; get over it.

The truth is there is a basic conflict between public interest and privacy here. But just what is “public interest” ? It is easy to think that it means whatever the public is interested in no matter how puerile, but that is most definitely not the case. Public interest is a bit of a vague term that could be described by “common well-being” or “general welfare” (both terms stolen from the Wikipedia article I linked to).

To qualify as a “public interest” item of news, a story needs to be about something of significance to the public’s well-being. For example, the chairman of a bank caught insider trading, a government minister selling government contracts, the Archbishop of Canterbury shagging the Queen.

People quite rightly expect a certain degree of privacy … even well-known footballers caught doing something they perhaps should not. In such cases the “public interest” has to be sufficient to override the privacy needs of the individual. To claim that it applies in the case of a footballer caught having an extra-marital affair is ridiculous. A footballer is just that … someone who plays football. Whether he or she is having an affair will have no impact on how well the ball leaves the foot.

Most of the fuss about the tweeting of the footballer’s name is simply caused by the old media who want to get in on the interest and sell newspapers. But the reasons why the injunction was obtained in the first place still apply – until the name was released by the old media, the tweeted name was little more than “tittle tattle” or plain gossip. Rightly or wrongly, a story being published in the gutter press gives that story an air of authenticity.

Oh! And a certain footballer needs to have a word with his lawyer – someone who specialises in injunctions should know that you need to get the injunction in both the English courts and the Scottish courts. It is possible the footballer didn’t want to pay for a second injunction (or whatever the legal instrument in Scotland is called), but it is also possible the lawyer didn’t mention it. And there is no excuse for a lawyer to be that ignorant – if I know that much about the law, an English lawyer should also.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Rape Case

General, Media, Politics No Responses »

May 212011

The news has been swamped with various items about the alleged rape of a hotel maid by Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the former head of the IMF). The alleged rapist has been paraded in front of the media wolves by the US authorities, vilified in the press with the stories containing the fig-leaf of the word “alleged”, and suffered worse in the “blogosphere”.

He has been effectively forced to resign from his job as the head of the IMF, and can pretty much say goodbye to his chances of becoming the next president of France.

Just the beginning of what he deserves, if he raped the hotel maid.

A gross injustice if he is innocent.

And as yet, we simply do not know if he is guilty or not. Despite those who believe in the old “no smoke without fire” saying, we need to wait until the trial before knowing if he is found to be guilty or to be innocent. Until his trial, he should be presumed to be innocent.

How On Earth Can He Be Innocent?

After all, the hotel maid has claimed he raped her, and identified him. Surely there can be no mistake. Actually there are a whole bunch of reasons why he may be innocent :-

The maid was raped, but by someone else with a similar appearance. It is easy to imagine how a rape victim might be confused afterwards, and mistakenly accused Dominique. Perhaps it is not very likely, but it is possible.
The maid is mentally unbalanced and imagined the rape. Again not that likely, but possible.
Consensual sex took place, but the maid for whatever reason changed her mind after the event. Yes this does happen from time to time.
The maid maliciously falsely accused him of rape. There are a variety of reasons for this, and the conspiracy theorists will like this one … if you wanted to get the head of the IMF “out of the way” because he was about to do something that would spoil your plans, there is pretty much nothing better than a false accusation of rape to do so.

None of this should be assumed of course … a woman has made an allegation of rape, and it should be treated as though it were true until it has been tested in a court of law. Indeed appropriate treatment (including counselling) could well result in additional information for a trial … whether it is supportive of the allegation, or refutes it.

How Can We Do This Better ?

At present, there is a presumably innocent man who has only just been released from prison into bail conditions that probably qualify as “house arrest”. His name is known, his family is known, and he has lost his job. All of this could happen to you whether or not you are likely to go out and commit rape (and women should note that this does include you!).

The victims of rape quite rightly get anonymity, but what about the alleged rapist ? If he or she is innocent, surely they deserve anonymity too ? Forget that you may be protecting a genuine rapist, at this point the alleged rapist is innocent.

Anonymity for an alleged rapist is the right thing to do. Difficult in practise to implement given that many will need to be kept in prison pending trial, and in cases of famous people like Dominique it may well be that their name escapes. But we should be trying to do the right thing even if it is difficult.

My R Cheat Sheet

Working Notes No Responses »

May 172011

This is going to be grossly insufficient for anyone trying to learn R (a wonderfully powerful statistical package … although the “stats” part of that may be my inner statistician). This is merely a set of commands I tend to use myself on the rather too rare occasions when I need R.

R is started with “R” at the command-line … of course (although “r” does something quite different).

Loading Data

If you have a file formatted like :-

number1 number2
number3 number4

Then this can be read into a “variable” with :-

> Data <- read.table("filename.dat")

If it is convenient to add column names into the file to give presentable names later on, then do so and tell R that there are headers :-

> Data <- read.table("filename.dat", header=TRUE)

Whilst R has plenty of control about how to read data … far more than I need at least, it may be easiest to munge your input data into the above format if you are more comfortable with the command-line. You can see how R has imported your data with :-

> names(Data)
[1]: "header1" "header2"

Later when it comes to doing something with the actual data, you can access the relevant “vector” with Data$header1. But hopefully you will choose more meaningful names!

Stats Summary

To produce a summary of a vector :-

> summary(vector)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
   1249    6938   18900   16210   24100   30840

Graphs

This section needs a lot of expansion. But to graph two variables … essentially one being a value at a particular time and the other being the time :-

plot(v1, v2, xlab="Horizontal label", ylab="Vertical label", main="Title")

This will draw the graph onto the default device – which is normally the main X11 display. If you want to change the output, you need to choose an alternate device. For a PNG file :-

png("filename.png")
(Redo the plot you're happy with)
dev.off()

Windows: Turning Off IPv6

Computing, Working Notes No Responses »

May 142011

This is a note for my own future sanity (like when I start using IPv6 and want this enabled again) given that this information is widely available around the network. If you do not know why you would want to turn off IPv6 when you are almost certainly not using it, then you probably want to do it anyway.

Hint: You may have a globally reachable IPv6 address on your machine that bypasses your firewall. And if that doesn’t worry you, it should!

Anyway, to turn it off run regedit in your preferred manner, and create the following DWORD attribute :-

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\tcpip6\Parameters\DisabledComponents

Set the value to FF (in hexadecimal). And reboot your machine.

So far this has worked with :-

Windows Server 2008R2
Windows 7 (Ultimate)

Do The Tories Want To Privatise Universities ?

Politics No Responses »

May 102011

Today a Tory let slip that some in the Tory party may be thinking of letting Universities supplement their income by offering additional places over the current quota to UK students which would be charged at the same rate as non-EU students. Of course they very rapidly back-pedalled from this position, but was it a slip or something that the Tories are planning … in a year or five ?

First of all, a little background. UK Universities are free to charge non-EU students pretty much what they want to within the constraints of supply and demand – pretty much like a business. This can be pretty lucrative for many Universities, and there is a fairly active pursuit of foreign students.

There are benefits and disadvantages to this of course. Foreign students may not always have the best possible English language skills which can conceivably have a detrimental effect on teaching. However offering a limited number of places to foreign students does have advantages that counter this – first of all exposing “native” students to foreign students widens the experience of both groups, and recruiting foreign students adds to the possible pool of expertise to hire the best researchers from.

But allowing Universities to recruit UK students on the same fees as non-EU students ? Well it might sound ok – allow the Universities to recruit students from anywhere to supplement their quota of UK students, but it is an obviously slippery slope from that. Over time the Tories could slowly cut the student quota and leave UK students with eventually little choice other than to pay the “full price” with no support for their education.

Of course the Tories claim that there are no such plans, but do we believe them ?

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